Milton's Rival Hermeneutics

"Reason Is But Choosing"

edited by Richard J. DuRocher and Margaret Olofson Thickstun

Publication Year: 2012

Recent critical conversation has described John Milton’s major works as sites of uncertainty, irreconcilability, or even confusion—as texts that actually reflect radical incoherence and openness. These newer critical voices posit, moreover, that traditional critics must strain to find coherence and authorial control in Milton’s poetry. Richard J. DuRocher and Margaret Olofson Thickstun, together with an esteemed group of Milton scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical backgrounds, respond to this challenge. While accepting the presence of uncertainty and welcoming the multiple perspectives that Milton builds into his works, this volume offers a variety of nuanced approaches to Milton’s texts.
As these 11 essays demonstrate, Milton’s own acts of interpretation compel readers to reflect not only on the rival hermeneutics they find within his works but also on their own hermeneutic principles and choices—an interpretive complexity that is integral to his poetry’s enduring appeal. Thus, each of the contributors takes up the problem of this interpretive dilemma in some way: several explore Milton’s own engagement with the texts of Scripture and the classics; some examine the ways in which Milton represents the process of interpretation in his narrative poems; and still others are intrigued by the challenges that Milton’s works present for the reader’s own interpretive skills.
Milton's Rival Hermeneutics, in responding directly to the “incertitude critics” of Milton, will be of interest to those on all sides of this debate and will certainly redirect the ongoing conversation.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

A Tribute to Richard J. DuRocher, 1955–2010

Like all the great Renaissance humanists, Rich DuRocher was
deeply grounded in Christian faith and in classical authors.
These two arenas of lifetime commitment came together
in his passionate engagement with Milton...

Introduction

John Milton’s works include interpretations of texts ranging
from classical myths to biblical narratives regarded in his day
as authoritative. In approaching these authoritative texts,
Milton can be seen to be both faithfully...

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept,
when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a...

3. Dead Shepherd: Milton’s Lycidas

Since the nineteenth century, when Mark Pattison, suiting
the image to the thing, called this stream-filled poem “the
high-water mark of English Poesy,” Milton’s Lycidas has
had more votes than any other as the greatest short poem...

4. Toward Latinitas: Revising the Defensio

My title alludes, obviously, to Mary Ann Radzinowicz’s magisterial
Toward Samson Agonistes: The Growth of Milton’s
Mind. Radzinowicz’s central premise is that Milton’s mind
and art developed dialectically, that the same concerns that...

Part Two: Reading Paradise Lost

5. Interpreting God’s Word — and Words — in Paradise Lost

Milton’s major poems are all based on biblical texts, requiring
him to interpret and present the essential meaning of those
texts and the stories they narrate. He treats those texts with
remarkable freedom, considering the anxieties...

6. Sites of Contention in Paradise Lost: Scenes of Instruction, Lessons in Interpretation

Milton’s poems are a provocation to repeated readings, with
their deepening complexity becoming strikingly evident, as
William Hayley attests, in “how ingeniously the great poet
adopted the most opposite...

7. Narrative, Judgment, and Justice in Paradise Lost

The most basic template for every interesting narrative situation
is a template of expected vindication.1 Someone is misunderstood
and expects, often with desperate wishfulness,
those who misunderstand...

Part Three: Reading Cruxes in Milton’s Major Poems

8. Rethinking “shee for God in him”: Paradise Lost and Milton’s Quaker Contemporaries

The meaning of gendered hierarchies in Paradise Lost has
long stood as a contentious issue in Milton criticism. In particular,
the line “Hee for God only, shee for God in him” has
prompted a wide range of responses...

9. Fame, Shame, and the Importance of Community in Samson Agonistes

As a young man, Milton desired recognition and understood
the social benefits of publicity, offering fame now and in the
future as incentive to study hard (Prolusion 7), to refrain from
destroying a poet’s house...

10. Satan in Paradise Regained: The Quest for Identity

Although Paradise Regained is based on the accounts told
briefly in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke of Satan’s
temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, Milton both enlarges
and elaborates on the temptations...

Milton often designs his poems’ plots around clashes over
differing interpretations of the same event, phenomenon, or
issue. We might describe such clashes as cases of rival hermeneutics.
For example, in...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.